Portable computing devices such as laptop personal computers, personal digital assistants, and the like are becoming ubiquitous due to the advances in the computing field. Such devices, however, typically rely on a battery to supply electrical power so that the computing device can be used in a portable fashion. Consequently, a user of the computing device often must depend on a battery status indicator to provide a method of displaying a status of the battery level to inform the user that charging of the battery may be necessary. Methods for monitoring the battery status can include determining battery capacity (percentage of battery power remaining) or battery voltage (voltage level of the battery).
A manufacturer of computing devices typically incorporates a battery status indicator in the manufactured computing device. One method of indicating the battery status includes accessing a Basic Input/Output System (BIOS) on the computing device. Typically, a BIOS includes a BIOS controller and BIOS data store. The BIOS data store may contain data representative of various aspects of the computing device, including, for example, power management settings and battery status data. The BIOS controller may include a set of instructions that perform various functions associated with maintaining the data in the BIOS data store (e.g., writing data to and reading data from the data store). The BIOS may be installed on a Read-Only Memory (ROM) chip or flash memory chip, for example, within the computing device.
Some manufacturer-provided battery status indicator programs interrogate the BIOS for battery status data that can be used to determine whether a battery status alert should be provided to the user. A battery status alert is a type of battery status indicator that alerts the user when a particular battery characteristic has fallen below a predefined level. In fact, some manufacturers provide stored programs that can be used to interrogate the BIOS to obtain this data for use in a battery status indicator or battery status alert.
Manufacturers of portable computing devices, however, typically confine users of such portable computing devices to the parameters provided thereby for indicating the status of the battery to the user. The battery status indicator provided by the manufacturer, however, may be inaccurate, or the battery status threshold, which triggers the battery status alert, may be set too low, thereby not providing adequate warning to the user to charge the battery.
Additionally, battery status indicators on the portable computing devices provided by the manufacturer are not integrated with applications programs that the users typically use on the computing device. It would be advantageous to users of such portable computing devices if a battery status indicator could be integrated into the applications program so that the user of the computing device would receive current, accurate battery status while using the applications program. Therefore, a need exists for a reliable and accurate battery status indicator, integrated into an applications program, with programmable parameters that permit the battery status threshold to be varied from that provided by the manufacturer.